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Adyen is making payments frictionless in every culture

A lot has changed since Adyen's CCO Roelant Prins worked at RBS in London. For one thing, payments is now "the most exciting thing on Earth," he tells the audience at WIRED Money 2015. Retailers and services today rely on retaining customers by offering them a totally frictionless payment method, and Netherlands-based Adyen has been working since 2006 to provide that.

The company, which counts Booking.com, Spotify, Airbnb and Dropbox as customers, sells itself as a single global platform for accepting payments anywhere in the world. It means if you are a young startup looking to scale or a multinational wanting to streamline and save money, you can take payments anywhere in the world in a way that works for the local culture. "You have to start with the consumer side," says Prins. That means first looking at spending habits. One of Adyen's best assets is its data. It has a country by country quarterly mobile index which shows what volume of payments originate from mobile devices. Unsurprisingly, iPhone takes the greatest share, and payment models can adapt for this.

Naturally, if so many transactions are happening on mobile, it's important for retailers to look at social platforms to secure sales. As an example of this, Adyen recently helped KLM setup a payment link they can share on Twitter for customers to upgrade their journey. "It works really week. People are making changes on the spot."

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Another area Adyen looks at helping bridge cultural payment differences, is in refused payments. "15 percent of all payments are refused. 25 percent of these are down to insufficient funds." Investigating further, Adyen found the data shows that the reason for this is different in different countries. So for instance, refusals due to insufficient funds are twice as high in the US by the end of the month, but this spike period differed in France and the UK. "We are focused on helping merchants bring this down," says Prins. Using those data insights, they can tell clients to take payments at different times of the month, in different countries. "We're enabling more people to make payment transactions," says Prins.

In Brazil, that might mean increasing revenue by accepting more payments in instalments (50 percent of payments made in the country are made this way). In the Netherlands, payment system iDEAL is used in 70 percent of all transactions -- when River island adopted it in the country, it doubled its revenues, says Prins -- while in China, if a retailer is not using Allipay, they will miss out on huge potential revenues.

The lesson is, rather than waiting for customers to change their habits, accommodate them -- no matter the diversity needed.